andersonfam.org

Yeah – it’s been a while since I’ve posted, so I figured that I should give an update…

The last week or so has been good – stuff is pretty busy at work, and I’ve had a few large projects on my plate. One of which has been moving our ~30 gig CVS repository over to a new server. The old server only had a gig or so of disk free, and our engineers were chewing through about 1 gig a month, so that repository really needed to be moved :-) Luckily, the move went over fairly well with very few issues, which is a good thing, since if CVS is down, that pretty much means that no one is able to do productive work. I’m pretty please with how I have CVS working now…I have samba/winbindd running, which allows me to use a pam module for winbind which authenticates users against our Active Directory server. This makes administration much easier for me. Eventually, we’re hoping to work towards some sort of Single sign-on architecture, and this is a step in that direction.

Okay, Ijust realized that I used four links to wikipedia in that last paragraph. Geez.

Also this week, I found out that my building permit was approved, so we’ll be starting serious work on our basement soon. 2×4′s, here I come. It’ll be great when it’s done…there’s just a large amount of work in front of me.

In other news, I got to place two calls into Dell support today, which is always great fun. This morning when I got into work, as I walked by one of our server racks, I saw the dreaded blinking orange light. Turns out one of the RAID 5 members died last night. Thank goodness for RAID5 – no data was lost. I called that one into Dell, and they had a replacement disk at our door in under three hours. Not too bad. I was able to replace the hot-swappable disk and start rebuilding the disk, which was still rebuilding the last time I checked. Fast-forward to about 45 minutes ago…I’m dorking around on one of my linux boxes using GNU Screen (I use Screen nearly all day long, so my left Ctrl key gets quite a workout). While navigating in Screen, the Ctrl key is used a lot, and all of a sudden, the Ctrl key got very mushy and stopped working. Great. So I got to call in a keyboard replacement. Hopefully that’ll arrive by friday. Luckily, I have been running with my Caps-Lock key re-mapped as a Ctrl key for the last year. I’m not sure what I’d do if I had to (God forbid) use the right Ctrl key. That would throw me off in a nasty way.

With that…I bid you adieu for the evening.

Okay – I’ve always known that there are some rather intense perl zealots out there. Only today did I realize how fanatical they can become.

Case in point.

This guy made a linux distro in which the only compiled piece of code is the linux kernel itself. The rest of the OS is written in perl. I don’t quite know what to say in response to this except…”Wow”.

Well I finally caved in and picked up a Roku SoundBridge last night. A few of my co-workers have them and have been raving about them for a few months. I picked it up at Best Buy, and upon arriving home, it took me all of 5 minutes to get it powered up, connected to my wifi, firmware upgraded, and playing music. Awesome.

I installed mt-daapd on my old-school Pentium Pro 180 MHz file server in the basement a week ago or so. Mt-daapd enables you to share out to iTunes clients from a linux box. The soundbridge is made to discover, via mdns, iTunes and other uPnP shares on the network, so it instantly detected my mt-daapd server. Another plus is that the Soundbridge has an optical digital out, which I put into good use immeadiately. It’s amazing how much better the audio quality is using the digital interconnects versus analog.

Anyways – you’ll all have to come over to check it out. Have a good hump day, y’all.

We’re just about nine hours away from the launch of KCMP. Geez, I’m excited! This station is going to be an amazing asset to the twin cities.

Click here to listen. It’s an aacplus stream, which is supported by the more recent versions of Winamp or Foobar 2000 if you’re on windows, or Videolan Media Player if you’re Mac OSX, linux, etc. Oh, they also have a windows media stream, for those who are so inclined. It’s not as good quality, though as the aacplus stream…

So I’ve had an old iPAQ 3835 for a long time that I’ve been wanting to throw linux on, but have been too nervous about doing it for fear of turning it into a brick…well tonight I overcame that, and got linux successfully installed! It was actually really easy – much moreso than I was expecting. The basic steps were thus:
Read more…